Episode 83 – Dumitru Brinzan on $200 WordPress Themes

Dumitru’s first coding job was in 2005, at a travel agency where he did some internal websites using PHP.

Dumitru’s first WordPress job was in 2010 with WPZOOM, where he made themes. There he learnt that a lot of time goes into support.

At heart, he considers himself a PHP developer first, WordPress developer second.

Dumitru explains the difference between Romanians and Moldavians.

Dumitru reveals why a country as small as Moldova has produced so many developers.

Why Dumitru packed his bags in 2016 and moved his family to Dortmund, Germany.

Donnacha antagonizes the entire population of Italy.

Why Dumitru decided to start his own theme company in 2013, and why he thought WordPress would be a good match for independent hotels.

How his decision to sell themes for $200, the most expensive price ever for WordPress themes at that time, sparked outrage.

Typically, theme companies spend 95% of their time on support, and 5% on development.

How his choice of Hermes as a brand name was mocked, all those years ago, by some online idiot … who turns out to have been Donnacha!

Donnacha wanders off into the completely unrelated news that a woman in Dortmund, Dumitru’s new home, has set up the world’s first sex doll brothel, and suggests that this qualifies Dortmund as a thriving center of innovation.

After one year, Dumitru’s impressions of Dortmund, the contrasts with Eastern Europe. Donnacha shares his impressions of life in Northern Thailand compared to Ireland or the UK.

Dumitru reveals his shameful lack of German. As a couple, they are mainly investing in his wife’s German language education, so, he’s going to be really screwed if she runs off with the milkman.

Why did Dumitru choose to live in Dortmund, and not somewhere in the south of Germany, closer to Moldova?

How big changes in the Google algorithm, in April of 2015, destroyed the independent WordPress theme business by undermining affiliate sites, and giving more power to the massive theme shop ThemeForest. Overnight, Dumitru lost half his sales and the effect on other independent theme developers was similar, encouraging many to sell or merge, marking a phase of consolidation and the end of what we now realize was a golden age for independent WordPress developers. The affiliate sites lost around 80% of their traffic, and everyone else became far more reliant on paid advertising … such as that sold by Google.